From Texas to the Big Open to Laramie an inventive bio of Jess Harper
by Kierysrielle
Summary: a 'biography' of Jess Harper describing his life from a Texas boyhood to ranching in Wyoming Territory after the Civil War.


Jacob Emrys Sayre Smith 'Jess' Harper was born on July 29, 1845 in Nacogdoches, Texas. He was born at the home of his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Cooper, the second son of Jennet and Frank Harper. Family stories say that Jess, as he came to be nicknamed took a hard, long time being born, and emerged into the world 'scrappy and tough as old shoe leather'. He needed to be, was always Jess' answer to that comment; and he wasn't far wrong about that.

Before Jess' birth, Jenny Harper gave birth to two daughters, Frances and Cathleen, and a son, Elisha. Only Frances, nicknamed Francie survived early childhood. Her small siblings were lost in a storm on Galveston's Island that nearly took the life of their mother as well. After Jess, two more sons, Alexander, Daniel, and three daughters Elizabeth, Millicent, and Mirielle were born to the Harper family. Only the last of their children, Millicent and Mirielle were born after the family moved from east Texas to the sparsely settled region known as the Texas Panhandle.

Once resettled there, Frank and Jenny Harper worked harder than ever; and they were glad to. They planned to purchase the land they lived on, and worked as sharecroppers 'for the time being'. The land was owned and shared out by a Fort Worth business concern. Their only goal was to populate and use as much of the empty land in west Texas as they profitably could, make a killing and move on. If the land was misused by some settlers and ranchers, if the crops failed or the stock died in a drought, these antebellum developers took it as a small, absorbable loss on the books. If the share cropping families were starving, exhausted, sick or otherwise failing that was no matter to the businessmen in Fort Worth. Another batch of would be land owners was waiting in lines that stretched back to the Louisiana border to take over the share.

Jenny and Frank taught their growing brood to read, to write, to figure, to work as hard as their parents and to fight, if it was for something they believed in. Quick-witted Jess, bookish Alec, and inventive Danny learned their Bible from Jenny and their hunting skills from Frank as the customs of the times dictated. Tomboyish Francie and Lissy learned their fighting skills from their brothers, their dreaming and compassion from their father, and their pragmatism from their mother. Twins Milly and Miri were born knowing how to charm the world around them, just like their brother Jess, and understanding in a toddler-fashion, how to wheedle their way to what they wanted, or away from what they didn't.

Jess especially seemed born knowing how to gentle a green broke yearling, soothe a fractious mare, or ease a pony's colic, lameness or plain, dangfool ornery nature. He had the same gift with dogs, coyotes, and all manner of wild hawks and other creatures on the Panhandle. As a boy, his sister Francie would later say, Jess was as quiet natured as Frank Harper and as whip-smart as Jenny, with a sense of fun that never quit. Also, Francie insisted, that up to the time Jess turned ten years old 'he never knew a stranger'.

All that changed forever in one hot, dry August night in 1855. The entire valley in which the Harpers lived and worked went up in flames, set in the deepest part of the night by raiders and land-grabbers. Hired gunmen known as the Bannisters torched twenty shared out parcels. Twenty homes, along with their outbuildings, stables, and corrals were torn down. Seventy people died, including Frank, Jenny, Lissy, Alec, Milly, and Miri Harper. Ten-year-old Jess saved both Francie and Danny, running back into the burning house for his brother. Francie said she worried for years afterwards that Jess would never escape the nightmare.

Francie, Jess and Danny, who'd fallen and broken his back in the burning house were taken home to Nacogdoches by their Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Daniel Smith. All three children were very different young people from the boisterous trio who left for the Panhandle some years before. Francie felt homeless, restless, as she became a young woman, and soon ran off with Gil Brady. Danny withdrew into himself for a time and only emerged with the patient, determined encouragement of his namesake uncle.

Jess, his aunt Beth would say later, seemed to vanish in the sense that the happy, playful boy was nowhere to be found now. Only Beth Smith seemed able to reach the youth at all; and she cherished her closeness to her sister's son. Jess himself would later tell his cousins and siblings that 'Aunt Beth glommed onto me so hard then that I couldn't take a step away without the risk I'd knock her plumb over'. Beth was also the only one who knew about and did all she could to ease Jess' nightmares of the fire and remorse for those he couldn't save. As an old man, Jess would write in his journal that his Aunt Beth kept him alive inside during a time when he would have otherwise blown away altogether like so many tumbleweeds in a high wind.

Like so many other youths and young men in Texas in those days, Jess and his cousins Cooper Smith, Jefferson Smith, Jemison Singer and Timothy Warren felt larger changes coming than they'd ever known. The world felt them coming. Inevitably, a war no one sanely wanted was about to be sparked

between one third of the Union and the other two thirds. The spark jumped and four years of fire and blood ensued, taking the lives of six hundred thousand young men, old men, boys, husbands, fathers and brothers. Many and radical changes transformed the men who fought and the women who waited for them. No longer would Americans say 'The United States are...' signifying the separateness of each state from each other and the Union. Instead we began to say 'The United States is...', signifying the proven fact and the strength of the Union.

Like thousands of his comrades at war, Jess Harper drifted west after the War's end. Toughened and sharpened by hardship, battle, and privation, Jess knew he had a task to complete, one he'd set down for the duration. He had to find and exact payment due from his parent's and siblings killers. He would live by his gun in 'the Big Open' for five years, honing his skills as a marksman, as a gunman, and occasionally, as a hostler or scout for the frontier Army. Jess would refuse only one line of work in that time. He had no interest in tracking men for a bounty. There was only one reward the young Texan sought, riding through Texas up into the Indian Territory, the Plains, and into the burgeoning cow towns.

Quick tempered and quick to pull a trigger, Jess kept his own code and his own sense of honor. He would not take sides in anyone else's fight, unless he saw the right of one side's argument. He would not accept any work that threatened a family or a woman. He would not kill for hire, or ride guard on a Tumbleweed Wagon. If Jess was hungry, cold, grieved, or lonely in these times, he was the only one who knew it, except for a finely conformed, strong and long-enduring bay called Traveler. Jess was one of a generation on the drift in those years, uprooted by War, and displaced by changes. If he'd come to hate that life, no one but 'Trav' would ever hear him say so.

By the time Jess Harper turned twenty five, he was an accomplished gunman, a well known tracker, and a former convict. By that time, he'd worked as a drover, a hostler, scouting, breaking horses, riding shotgun on stages, and standing guard at a bank in Denver. It was the last of those that got Jess a spell in the Colorado Territorial prison, when he was tricked by some trail riding friends who'd promoted themselves to bank robbers. Iron-loyal to a friend, Jess wouldn't give them away. On his release, Jess flipped a coin given him by the warden; tails he'd ride west towards California, heads he'd head north into Wyoming Territory and the northwest.

'The road north won," Jess would say years later. "Don't know how, maybe that coin was chipped or weighted somehow. Maybe it just knew something I didn't. Seems like a few weeks later I was just stretching out to take a few winks' rest before riding towards Montana. Seems like I decided to take that rest on a spit of land belonging to a rock-hard stubborn, gangly, bad tempered, downright unfriendly cuss named Sherman. Guess that coin knew something after all. It knew that cuss needed a decent ranch hand, a good man with a gun, and a partner. And there I was."

Barbara Stanwyck as Jennet Meredydd Cooper Harper [Jess' mother]

Henry Fonda as Francis Marion Harper [Jess' father]


End file.
